A clear image of the Lafayette, Louisiana shooter is emerging, and some of it is horrifically disturbing.
The man who Thursday night shot and killed two people and wounded nine others before killing himself after trying to avoid police was 59-year old John Russel “Rusty” Houser. He has been described as a “drifter,” but a far clearer picture is emerging, and some of it is frightening.
Let’s take a look.
Houser was a former political candidate and activist in Columbus, Georgia, a local newspaper, the Ledger-Enquirer, reports. He “ran as a Republican for tax commission, but was charged for stealing an opponent’s yard signs and withdrew.” He also “had been admitted to practice law in Alabama after attending an unaccredited night law school.”
“He was very outspoken, highly intelligent, really didn’t trust government and anything about government. He always thought something was going on behind the scenes. He came across with a very conservative agenda,” Superior Court Judge and former Columbus Mayor Bobby Peters told the Ledger-Enquirer. The paper adds that that court records showed he had “a history of mental health issues, i.e., manic depression and/or bi-polar disorder.”
Here are the only two tweets Houser ever posted:
On an online political discussion board, Houser wrote, “All sexual deviants are equal, that is true. Put them on a cold island or put decent people on a cold island. Either way, that will end the problem. Decent people can retake the entire world, as Hitler proved.” On that same site he also participated in threads titled “Gay marriage vs. pulygamy,” and “Marriage Equality; does the end game begin?”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks and researches about 900 hate groups, plus individuals associated with them and their ideologies, today examines Houser in an article titled, “Lafayette Theater Shooter Fan of David Duke, Neo-Nazis, and Antigovernment Conspiracies.”
Houser was, the SPLC reports, “a politically disaffected, angry man who viewed the United States as a ‘financially failing filth farm,’ expressed interest in white power groups, anti-Semitic ideas, the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church, as well as a number of conspiracy theories often espoused by the antigovernment right.”
A decade ago, Houser “registered to attend David Duke’s European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO) Conference in New Orleans,” the SPLC notes. “He lauded Duke, one of the most recognizable figures of the American radical right, a neo-Nazi, longtime Ku Klux Klan leader and now an international spokesman for Holocaust denial. On a PoliticalForum.com, Houser wrote in 2013, ‘David Duke has been unseen or hear of in years, but at one time appeared exactly what US needed.'”
He also “belonged to a forum associated with Tea Party Nation. He sang the praise of Adolf Hitler many times, saying ‘Hitler is loved for the results of his pragmatism,’ last January on the website stateofmind13.com.”
Noting that Houser “expressed racists extremism,” the SPLC goes on to report that he “promoted the disproven racist theory that a connection exists between race and IQ, and promoted The Bell Curve, a book written by Charles Murray.”
NCRM has written about Murray several times. Murray is often quoted by current GOP presidential candidates and often lauded by conservatives.
Houser’s membership with Tea Party Nation is notable given the extremism of the group. It’s not just another Tea Party Group. The SPLC has reported on them, as has NCRM. Its head has claimed that socialism has killed a billion people, and strongly suggested that President Barack Obama is a gay, crack-cocaine-smoking, marijuana-using drug addict who did poorly in college.
Raw Story reports “Houser was evicted last year from a rental property on 32nd Street, where his estranged wife owns a home that can be seen flying a Confederate flag on a Google maps search. It’s not clear whether he lived at the home when the photo was taken.”
On Facebook, he liked only two groups, including, I hate liberals!, which hasn’t been active since 2013.
ThoughtCatalog adds that he “supported Islamic fanaticism and the terror that comes with it,” “was supportive of Hilter’s Nazi Germany,” “believed George Zimmerman was a national hero,” and concludes, “was absolutely, positively, a terrorist.”
Houser was also a fan of a Christian Tea Party blog, Fellowship of the Minds, according to research by IBTimes.
In a blog post titled, “Moral Sickness at Root of America’s Decay,” Houser commented several times, including making this chilling remark: “The end comes, and I love it.”
Bottom line: Houser, according to the trail he left on the Internet, was anti-gay, a white supremacist, anti-government, a racist, a supporter of the Tea Party, Hitler, Iran and Islamic extremism – but not a Muslim – and a supporter of neo-Nazism.Â
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Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Houser’s political activities as being in Columbus, Ohio. They took place in Columbus, Georgia.
Image by Carolyn Scofield via Twitter